Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Alfred Hitchcock | Torn Curtain

It
is difficult to ascertain why Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain is not a great
movie. Clearly it is not as tightly written, as clever and sardonic as Rear
Window or North by Northwest. Both Universal Studios and Hitchcock
were generally displeased with Brian Moore’s original screenplay, which they
saw as too dour, and called in the writing team of Willis Hall and Keith
Waterhouse to fix it. So too was Hitchcock displeased with the original score
by his trusted composer, Bernard Herrmann, and called for a new score by John
Addison. Addison’s music, with its driving, pulsing force, is quite
satisfactory, if not as broodily romantic as Herrmann’s previous contributions.

Because of actor Julie Andrew’s busy
schedule, Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film at a much faster pace than he
wanted. Perhaps more time would have taken some of the kinks out of the movie. But
it is also clear that throughout the shooting the director had become somewhat
disinterested.

The major problem seems to stem from the
presence of its two leading stars, Paul Newman and Andrews, hoisted upon
Hitchcock by the studio Although both actors had done brilliant films—Andrews
just coming off of two big money makers, Mary Poppins and The Sound
of Music, and Newman having just recently done brilliant work in The
Hustler and Hud—they were clearly not the right kind of players for
Hitchcock’s hands-off methods, and together they create little of the
electricity needed to convince us that Andrews’ Sarah Sherman would give up her
American citizenship to follow Newman’s Professor Michael Armstrong into East
Germany. Newman’s need, as a method actor, to constantly be told of his
motivations reportedly received Hitchcock’s sarcastic response, “the motivation
is your salary.” While usually following every move of his female heroines with
the loving lens of his camera, Hitchcock basically leaves Andrews to her own
brittle British prudery. It’s hard to know why she loves Armstrong, and even
more difficult to comprehend what Armstrong sees in his handsome,
self-sufficient but nearly sexless assistant. Andrews may make a great nanny
and governess, but despite her bedroom dalliances early in the film, we doubt
she’s much fun in the sack. And despite the handsome exteriors of Hitchcock
stars of the past such as Cary Grant and Sean Connery, he obviously didn’t know
what to do with the simmering cute-boy.

So Hitchcock turned his camera, instead,
on his minor actors, eliciting wonderfully eccentric portraits from Lila
Kedrova as the Countess Kuchinska, desperate to find an American sponsor to get
her out of the country; Tamara Toumanova as the mean and vengeful Ballerina;
Wolfgang Kieling as the vernacular-English-spouting Stasi Thug, Hermann Gromek;
Ludwig Donath’s exasperated Professor Gustav Lindt; and the nearly speechless
Carolyn Conwell as the Farmer’s wife. Despite their star-statuses, Newman and
Andrews became mere mannequins surrounded by such fine character actors. For
his leads, Hitchcock might as well have used puppets, despite Newman’s and
Andrews’ physical attractiveness.

Beyond these obvious problems, however,
there are several absolutely brilliant episodes in the film, certainly better than anything in
his previous psychologically hackneyed film Marnie.

One of the best moments early in the
film is the long scene when Armstrong attempts to escape the tracks of Gromek
as he enters the Museum zu Berlin, Hitchcock’s camera following through the
patterned floors with the sound of footsteps following each of Armstrong’s
moves. It’s an eerily troubling sequence which demonstrates the real-life
experience of what it is like to be followed in a world where there is no
possible escape.

Almost all critics have commented on the
long sequence on the farm where Armstrong and the farmer’s wife are forced to
kill Gromek when he discovers their involvement with the underground movement
π. As Hitchcock told French director François Truffaut, he wanted to show just
how difficult it was to kill a man, unlike the James Bond films and similar thrillers.
Since they cannot fire a gun without alerting the taxi drive waiting outside,
they are forced to use body parts, knives, pans, and, ultimately, gas, to do in
the struggling bull, a scene which plays out like a horrifying and yet comic
ballet—shot mostly in silence—than the murder which it actually portrays,
ending with Armstrong washing the blood from hands. That scene alone ought to
justify watching Torn Curtain.

Yet there are dozens of other scenes
almost as exhilarating. Kedrova’s near-mad devouring of the couple as she seeks
their help, and her intense cries of “Bitte, Bitte” at post office minions are,
once again, both agonizing and funny, creating a kind of intense pathos that
reveals her aging desperateness.

The scene with Armstrong and Lindt,
wherein the German physicist is gradually drawn through his pride and
intellectual loneliness into a web where he unintentionally betrays his
country, all played out against the clock as Armstrong is poised to escape, is
absolutely breathtaking.

So
too is the frighteningly funny bus ride through the East German countryside.
The bus, owned and operated by the Members of π, and filled by their
proponents, is given a special escort of the East German police at the very
same when the real bus of to Berlin catches up with its simulacrum. Here
Addison’s jaunty and forward-pulsing music almost matches the naughty-boy
mischievousness of his Tom Jones score.

Underneath, under cover so to speak, Torn
Curtain, accordingly, contains a whole series of shorts that are well worth
watching, even if, by film’s end, we are faced again with only the two
dripping, wet leads. Although they may live happily ever after, the film has
not. But as one critic commented, if Hitchcock had made no other films, we
might find Torn Curtain a pretty good work of its day.